MaTESe: Machine Translation Evaluation as a Sequence Tagging Problem

Stefano Perrella, Lorenzo Proietti, Alessandro Scirè, Niccolò Campolungo, Roberto Navigli


Abstract
Starting from last year, WMT human evaluation has been performed within the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework, where human annotators are asked to identify error spans in translations, alongside an error category and a severity. In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task, where we propose using the same paradigm for automatic evaluation: we present the MaTESe metrics, which reframe machine translation evaluation as a sequence tagging problem. Our submission also includes a reference-free metric, denominated MaTESe-QE. Despite the paucity of the openly available MQM data, our metrics obtain promising results, showing high levels of correlation with human judgements, while also enabling an evaluation that is interpretable. Moreover, MaTESe-QE can also be employed in settings where it is infeasible to curate reference translations manually.
Anthology ID:
2022.wmt-1.51
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Philipp Koehn, Loïc Barrault, Ondřej Bojar, Fethi Bougares, Rajen Chatterjee, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Federmann, Mark Fishel, Alexander Fraser, Markus Freitag, Yvette Graham, Roman Grundkiewicz, Paco Guzman, Barry Haddow, Matthias Huck, Antonio Jimeno Yepes, Tom Kocmi, André Martins, Makoto Morishita, Christof Monz, Masaaki Nagata, Toshiaki Nakazawa, Matteo Negri, Aurélie Névéol, Mariana Neves, Martin Popel, Marco Turchi, Marcos Zampieri
Venue:
WMT
SIG:
SIGMT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
569–577
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.51
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefano Perrella, Lorenzo Proietti, Alessandro Scirè, Niccolò Campolungo, and Roberto Navigli. 2022. MaTESe: Machine Translation Evaluation as a Sequence Tagging Problem. In Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), pages 569–577, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MaTESe: Machine Translation Evaluation as a Sequence Tagging Problem (Perrella et al., WMT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wmt-1.51.pdf